U.S. needs 60 to 80 gigawatts of new power by 2030

Eric Schmidt stated that the United States requires between 60 and 80 gigawatts of new power capacity by 2030 or 2031 to support AI infrastructure. He estimated the cost of building one gigawatt of power at approximately $50 billion, noting that one gigawatt is equivalent to one nuclear power plant. Schmidt contrasted this with China, which produced 560 gigawatts of energy last year, largely from renewable sources, and is building data centers massively without the seven-year interconnection queue delays present in the U.S. He argued that the U.S. lacks the energy and data center infrastructure to compete, suggesting that the solution is to build private power systems on empty land to support data center construction. Schmidt believes this strategy is necessary to counter China's industrial policy advantage in energy and compute.